Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: a bushel of beets can be grown quite as cheaply as a bushel of potatoes, and will yield fourfold, averaging one year with another, and they always command a fail- price during the fall and winter and early spring months. Sometimes the prices rule very high, and in case of low prices they can be fed out or sold for that purpose to advantage. It is astonishing how little attention is paid to the cultivation of beets for feeding by the farmers of this country when they can be raised with so little trouble, and the larger varieties yield so enormously. They arc very nutritious and healthful for stock, coming in use as they do in the absence of all green or laxative food, which is quite as essential for stock, especially cattle, as for mankind. Soil and Preparation.—The soil best adapted to beets is a deep, rich, sandy loam. The land should be plowed in the fall if possible, and in the spring have a dressing of at least twenty two-horse loads of stable-manure to the acre, which should be plowed in, or one thousand pounds of bone-flour, or five hundred pounds of guano, harrowed in. The ground should be deeply plowed, finely harrowed and back-harrowed, and if not then free from lumps, be raked by hand. Sowing and Cultivating.—The land being prepared, stretch the line, and mark with the fifteen-inch marker rows about an inch and a half deep. Sow the seed at the rate of four pounds to the acre for main crop, or six pounds when sown very early, as the spring frosts rnay destroy a part of the first sown, and cover by raking lengthwise with the rows. For early, sow almost as soon as the ground can be worked, and from then until the first of June. I have known them to do well sown as late as July, but consider the first part of May the best time to put in the main crop. When the plant...